


Godfathers

by lyricwritesprose



Series: Tales of the Them [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: I may write some more romantic fic later, M/M, but this is about Aziraphale and Crowley being proper godfathers, sort of light on the relationships really, there's one really flirtatious line and that's it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-13 20:31:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19258660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: Anathema Device doesn't know how to help Adam with whatever issues he's having, but she thinks she knows who can.(The truth is, although I really like all the headcanons about Aziraphale and Crowley being involved in Adam's life, I feel like these two dumbasses would need a little bit of a push togetinvolved.  So this is the story of that push.)





	Godfathers

Even after she started looking, in October, it took Anathema a while to find the two men who had taken her book and then showed up for Armeggedon. But Newt thought that Shadwell might know, and Shadwell—after asking a very personal question that Anathema outright refused to answer for several minutes[1]—gave her the address that he knew of for “the Southern Pansy.”

So Anathema found herself at a book store in the middle of London. It was closed. There was a young man right outside having trouble with something stuck to the sidewalk. Anathema stepped around him.

The sign on the door said: “I open the shop on most weekdays around 9:30 or perhaps 10am. While occasionally I open the shop as early as 8, I have been known not to open until 1, except on Tuesday. I tend to close about 3:30pm, or earlier if something needs tending to. However, I might occasionally keep the shop open until 8 or 9 at night, you never know when you might need some light reading. On days that I am not in, the shop will remain closed. On weekends, I will open the shop during normal hours unless I am elsewhere. Bank holidays will be treated in the normal fashion, with early closing on Wednesdays, or sometimes Fridays. (For Sundays, see Tuesdays.)”

There were, Anathema thought, briefer and easier ways to say, “Fuck you, I do what I want.”

The question was, should she knock on the door? On the one hand, it seemed virtually impossible to come back during regular business hours, because they weren’t. On the other hand—

On the other hand, she was a little nervous about this.

She could not, she finally decided, stand by and do nothing. Adam was—on edge. There were only two people, if “people” was the right word, who she _suspected_ might be able to do something about his issues, and on the whole, she’d rather brave the bookshop than go back to Shadwell, endure interrogation about private body features, and get the address of someone that the white-blond one had implied was the actual Serpent of Eden.

She knocked.

For a moment, she thought that nothing would happen. Feeling a little bolder at the idea that they were out, she knocked harder.

The door opened abruptly under her fist. “The sign says,” the white-blond one said snappishly, “that we are _closed—”_ He blinked, and his tone changed. “Bicycle Girl? Er, I mean, Miss Device?”

“Yes, I’m sorry to disturb—”

“Oh, no, come in, come in! I just made cocoa!” He shooed her inside, closed the door, and very carefully checked to make sure that the sign said Closed. “Mustn’t have any customers trying to get in,” he explained. Despite the cheery tone, the word _customers_ somehow reminded Anathema of the way a farmer might address the question of _varmints._ She made a mental note not to ask about buying any of the books around her, even though some of them looked fascinating.

The white-blond—being—ushered her into the back room. They weren’t alone in it.

The one in the dark glasses, the one that might or might not be the Serpent, was lounging on a desperately out-of-date plaid couch. Anathema thought of the British-ism that Newt had sprung on her the other day, about his mother: _she could complain for England,_ he had said. It looked to her as if the Serpent could lounge for England, unless he preferred to lounge for some warmer country that had more of a reputation for decadence and debauchery.

“Book girl!” the Serpent said. He sounded genuinely happy to see her.

“Do sit down,” the white-blond one added. “How’s your young witch-finder, then? I’m terribly sorry, your ancestor’s book said whom most of the _dramatis personae_ were, if you will, but not any of their names.”

“Newt,” Anathema said. “His name’s Newt Pulsifer.” She thought about it, and added, “I’m Anathema.”

“I’m Crowley,” the one in the dark glasses volunteered. “And that’s Aziraphale. Thanks, angel.” Somewhere between Aziraphale’s hands and his own, the cup of hot chocolate turned into a glass of dark red wine.

Aziraphale made a sound that Anathema suspected was actual tutting. “You _are_ going to give me my mug back,” he told Crowley, and gave a second mug to Anathema, who thanked him a little nervously. The mug was full of hot chocolate, not music of the spheres or clouds or anything angelic. A tiny, cautious taste revealed it to be excellent hot chocolate, but hot enough to burn her tongue if she wasn’t careful.

“Newt’s doing well,” Anathema went on. “He’s—we’re taking it slow, but he understands why, and he’s being very sweet about it.”

Aziraphale frowned very slightly over his own hot chocolate. “You’re mortal, though. You don’t have _that_ long, in the great scheme of things. And you seemed so nice together.”

“It’s the prophecy,” Anathema explained.

The angel’s face cleared. “Oh, the dirty prophecy conundrum. Of course.”

It was Anathema’s turn to frown. “‘Dirty’ prophecy?” Was that an insult of some kind?

“Prophecy theory,” Aziraphale explained. “You have the concept of a ‘clean’ prophecy, a Platonic ideal, as it were: a prophecy that is kept in a vault, hidden from anyone who might affect or be affected by it, and taken out and analyzed once the prophecied event has been and gone. And then you have a purely ‘dirty’ prophecy,” he made quotes with his free fingers, “along the lines of, oh, ‘You will adopt a boy and name him Rupert.’ No actual precognition required, you see, just the apparent prophecy causing the event. Most solid prophecies are a mixture of the two. But from my brief perusal, I could see that many of Agnes Nutter’s prophecies were in fact _fairly_ dirty in that they meddled outright with the events they predicted. For a very good cause, of course. But _you,_ as an individual, would have to wonder how much the prophecies have to do with you becoming the sort of person who is attracted to young Newt, and if you actually are, and where free will plays into it, and it could all become a terrible muddle. Er. My sympathies. That doesn’t sound like a tremendously easy way to meet someone.”

“There are worse,” Crowley murmured.

“That’s it exactly,” Anathema said, and looked down at her hot chocolate. It was close enough, anyway. Substitute a classic Anglo-Saxonism for the word "attracted."

"And are things in Tadfield all right otherwise?" Aziraphale went on. "You know, here in London, all the effects of the apocalypse seem more or less, well, reversed. No flaming circle of fire and damned souls on the M25, that sort of thing. A few changes to my shop, but otherwise . . ."

"What the angel is trying to say," Crowley interjected, "is, why are you here? And," a slightly darker tone, "why are you so nervous?"

Anathema felt her heart give an unpleasant lurch. It wasn't that Crowley was particularly frightening as a person, but the wine in his hand was a reminder that he _wasn't_ a person. How much difference was there between turning a cup of hot chocolate into wine, and turning an offending human into a toaster oven? And what counted as "offending?"

"When you say 'angel,'" Anathema began cautiously, "you mean--"

"Formerly the Angel of the Eastern Gate," Aziraphale said. "Principality of Heaven, and all that. Er. I suppose--retired now? I'm not entirely sure what to call myself anymore."

"Yes. Well. The thing about being a—student of the metaphysical—" Just in case it was dangerous to say _witch._ "Is that most sources warn practitioners to stay far away from metaphysical beings."

"Oh, no, we're perfectly harmless--" Aziraphale began.

 _"Don't,"_ Crowley cut in, "call me harmless."

"But my dear, you have to admit--"

"I don't have to admit anything. That business with the apple makes me the author of all human misery, and now I'm freed from the constraints of Hell. I may be the most dangerous being on Earth." The idea seemed to amuse him.

"Constraints of Hell?" Anathema said, mouth dry, just as Aziraphale said, "But what you actually _do_ is stick coins to the sidewalk right outside my shop--"

"Yes, but that's my choice. I could track down that traffic warden from yesterday, turn her into an orchid, and grind her into bits when her leaves start to show spots."

"Yes, but you wouldn't."

"But I _could._ So could you, if you wanted. I know how much you hate customers."

"I would never!" Aziraphale huffed. He looked away. “I might _think_ about it, but I would never _do_ it.”

“Constraints of hell?” Anathema repeated in a small voice.

“We weren’t supposed to take human lives directly,” Crowley explained. He sounded very casual about it. “We could set up motive, means, and opportunity, but technically we weren’t supposed to kill people. I’ve suspected for a while that demons like Hastur and Ligur did it every chance they got, but that just goes back to the most essential rule of Hell. Or Heaven, when you think about it.”

“What rule?” Anathema asked.

“‘Don’t get caught.’” Crowley took a swig of wine by way of punctuation. “The point is, I’m not a demon of Hell anymore. I’m just a demon. Or possibly a demon of Earth. We’re free agents.” He regarded her carefully through the dark glasses. “Does that frighten you?”

“I’m still not sure how much of it I understand,” Anathema admitted, “but—Heaven and Hell both wanted to destroy Earth.” Which should have made them more frightening than a couple of free agents who mostly wanted to sip their respective drinks and mildly bicker with each other, but then, she wasn’t in a room with Heaven and Hell.

 _“The leadership_ of Heaven and Hell wanted to destroy Earth,” Crowley clarified. “Correct blame is important.”

“You’ve been taking incorrect blame ever since I’ve known you. You took credit for the Spanish Inquisition. You spent three weeks blind drunk after you found out about the Spanish Inquisition. It was impressive. I started to worry about your liver, and you don’t technically have one.”

“Right, air my clean laundry in public, why don’t you,” Crowley said bitterly.

“You think the rank and file didn’t want war?” Anathema said, trying to cut through the back-and-forth.

“Not sure,” Crowley said. “Your Dukes of Hell and the like, they’re bastards to the core, but your average demon is no more unpleasant than middle management.”

“Weren’t they the inspiration for middle management, in fact?” Aziraphale wondered aloud.

“Actually, I was thinking more of angels when I invented it, but that’s part of the point. Sooner or later, Heaven and Hell are going to send more angels and demons here to interfere with the world, and wouldn’t it be a heaven of a thing if they—what was the phrase?”

“‘Went native,’” Aziraphale said.

Crowley pointed at him. “That.”

“You think you can tempt them?” Aziraphale said, and then, more slowly, “You think we can tempt them? Not just ordinary tempting, but—big tempting.”

Crowley smiled lazily. “Don’t worry, angel, I’ll show you how it’s done.” He took a sip of wine.

Aziraphale looked flustered. The point of that sentence, Anathema thought, had been to make Aziraphale look flustered, and it had succeeded admirably. _Were_ they a couple? They definitely seemed couple- _adjacent._ “You never did say,” Aziraphale said rather hastily to Anathema, “why you’re here.”

“It’s about Adam,” Anathema said.

******************************

Adam had, apparently, recovered perfectly well from nearly bringing about the end of the world.

At first.

But then, Anathema had noticed, he seemed to start avoiding the rest of the Them. He came over to her house to talk about environmentalism and clean out her store of snacks—she had started buying extra for him. But he contrived to be somewhere else when the Them came looking for him. On one occasion, he had contrived to be somewhere else by bolting out the back door when Anathema was answering the front door, and after that, she had resolved to sit him down and make him tell her what was going on.

Which took some doing. An Adam who didn’t want to talk about something was an Adam who was nearly impossible to find. And he was still immune to dowsing.

Finally, though, Anathema managed to pin him down. He had muttered something about not knowing whether they played his games because they wanted to play his game or because of “other stuff,” and when Anathema had pressed him, he had told her, “You don’t understand! Nobody understands! You don’t have powers! There’s nobody on Earth who understands me!” and stormed off in an almost-teenage huff.

Anathema had thought about this for a little bit, and then resolved to prove him wrong.

*******************************

Aziraphale and Crowley exchanged glances.

“Adam,” Aziraphale said slowly, “still has powers?”

“I haven’t seen him do anything spectacular,” Anathema admitted, “but I’m pretty sure. He’s been stealing fruits that aren’t in season. And the weather in Tadfield is still perfect. So far, anyway.”

“He rewrote history,” Crowley objected. “He changed things so he was his father’s son _and always has been._ He’s entirely disconnected from Hell. Or he should be . . .”

“He might have a personal wellspring,” Aziraphale said.

“That’s impossible. He’s not an angel. Or a demon, for that matter.”

“No, but he is something new in the world—”

 _“Was_ something new in the world—”

“Personal wellspring?” Anathema repeated.

Crowley gestured between himself and Aziraphale. “We’re cut off,” he explained. “Once Heaven and Hell figured out that they couldn’t control us and couldn’t kill us, they did the next best thing. They severed us from the Holy Light and the Unholy Darkness. All we have to draw on is our own internal powers. Heaven calls it a personal wellspring, Hell calls it a personal flame. Same principle. It’s still enough for some serious mayhem, but it recharges a lot more slowly now, so we have to be careful. The point is, a human shouldn’t have one.”

“There might be a paradox involved,” Anathema said slowly. “For Adam to be—normal, he had to change the past, but for the past to be changed—”

Aziraphale blinked at her twice. “You mean, to make himself not the son of Satan, he needed to capable of miracles, or else he would still be infernal, so those miracles—lingered, to avoid giving the temporospatial continuum an infernal headache?”

“That’s my best guess,” Anathema said. “Anyway, does it matter _why_ he has powers? The question is, will you help him with whatever he’s going through?”

“Neither of us ever had a childhood,” Aziraphale objected. “We weren’t born, we were actualized. Let alone an adolescence! We wouldn’t know where to start.”

“We didn’t do that badly with Warlock,” Crowley said.

“ . . . Warlock?”

“The main reason Adam wasn’t raised with the powers of Hell interfering in his life,” Aziraphale explained, “was a, a sort of a mix-up . . .”

“Cockup,” Crowley amended.

“Which meant that the two of us spent years trying to raise the wrong Antichrist . . .”

“With the idea that we would cancel each other out . . .”

“And that he would reject his powers and cancel the Apocalypse. But, you see, we spent the entire time _lying_ to him. This is different. The truth is, neither of us is used to—relating to humans—who know about us. Crowley here is used to convincing people that he's frightfully evil, and the last time I told anyone about myself, before the Apocalypse, anyway . . .” His face darkened and he looked away.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Crowley said.

“I could have done more than just argue with Gabriel.”

“You did. You argued with him, and then you came back to Earth fully intending to spirit her away to Spain or parts further away, only by that time they had bullied her back into trousers and the deed was done. And I told you at the time, I wouldn’t put it past Gabriel to keep you talking too long on purpose, to give his precious martyrdom scheme a chance to work, only you got angry and called me a scaly wanker. Which may show that I knew more about Heaven than you did, but it doesn’t make it your _fault.”_

“I don’t remember the last bit,” Aziraphale admitted.

“I don’t imagine you do. I was starting to worry about _your_ nonexistent liver, and I was the one who started you drinking.” He looked down at his own wine. “I thought it would help.”

“It didn’t.”

“I know. I said I was sorry. The point is—” He caught Anathema staring at him. “Joan of Arc.”

“I gathered,” Anathema said faintly. She had always assumed that immortals wouldn’t know as much about the important people of history as television writers liked to suppose, since the average person isn’t on speaking terms with the President and there was no reason to assume that immortals would be either. She hadn’t counted on the immortals’ respective Home Offices actively pushing them in the direction of historical events.

“I only met her once. Tried to tempt her with taking proper control over France, and she chased me half a mile with a carving knife. That’s not the point. The point is, you can’t shy away from properly talking to humans because of Archangel _fucking_ Gabriel. And don’t tell me to watch my language,” Crowley added, as Aziraphale opened his mouth indignantly, “I’m a demon, I’ll swear at Gabriel any time I feel like he deserves it.” He paused for a time span only measurable by computers. “Oh, loooook. He deserves it again. Fucking Gabriel.”

There was a pause, while Anathema discovered that the dregs of her hot chocolate were only tepid.

“You may have a point,” Aziraphale said finally, meekly.

“I always have a point. About which part? Gabriel, or—”

“Talking to people.”

********************************

"It's the prophecy that's doing it," Anathema told Newt later. "Really there was nothing to be afraid of at all."

"We got rid of the prophecy," Newt said, confused.

"That's just it. Before, I always had a blueprint for my life. I knew that if I stayed on the course that was laid out for me, I would be fine until the end of the world. But the end of the world has come and gone, and I could die tomorrow by falling brick and never even have 'Beware ye the Brikke that Falleth from the Heavens,' to warn me. And that was what made meeting them frightening. I didn't know if I was supposed to do it. I didn't know if I would come out alive, dead, or houseplant. How do people cope?"

"Mostly we just muddle through, I suppose," Newt said. He looked at Anathema closely. "You might have a lot in common with them, if it comes to that."

"With Aziraphale and Crowley?"

"All a bit adrift without the supernatural directives you're used to relying on. Heaven, Hell, the prophecies. I mean, not always liking them is one thing, but you can still sort of . . . I mean, not having them is a kind of . . . um. I'm not sure what I'm trying to say. Ignore me."

"No," Anathema said. "I think you're making a lot of sense."

She didn't kiss him. They weren't quite there yet, despite what had happened when the world was ending. But she thought it might be nice if she did, later.

********************************

Adam saw them coming.[2]

He considered running away. There was no way they could find him, at least not in Tadfield. Adam could evade anyone and anything in Tadfield. It was just a question of whether he wanted to.

Besides, he might get a chance to ask them why they hadn’t come back.

They had helped him. He had only known them for a moment, but they had genuinely helped him face down the Thing that had been coming for him. He remembered how he had felt, sick with fear, entirely powerless. And they had told him that he wasn’t. They had stood beside him, holding his hands, one with a sword and the other with what looked like part of a car, and had faith in him to shout It down.

Adam stayed where he was.

The one in tan was puffing a bit as he climbed the last bit of the slope to where Adam was sitting. The one in black moved—interestingly. Adam carefully considered the merits of trying to walk like that. It might add a level of cool to whatever he was doing, or Pepper might laugh at him and ask if he thought his bollocks needed the breathing room. It was a tough call.

“Mind if we join you?” the one in tan panted.

“I’m just sitting here,” Adam said, shrugging. That was good. It conveyed the necessary level of unconcern and, indeed, disinterest, that was necessary for dealing with adults. Then, reluctantly sacrificing coolness points to curiosity, “You never told me your names.”

“Oh! I’m Aziraphale. That’s Crowley.”

They sat somewhat gingerly beside him as Adam poked at the ground with a stick.

“I thought you would come back,” Adam finally admitted. “Months ago. But you didn’t. You just cared about me stopping the apocalypse, you didn’t care about me. So do you want something, or did Miss Device get you to come?”

“I thought,” Aziraphale stuttered, “I thought we were better off out of your life, you know, a normal, human life without angels and demons hanging about making things difficult—”

“Miss Device asked us to come,” Crowley said.

“Yeah,” Adam muttered, “I figured.”

Crowley paused, and then took off his glasses.

Adam momentarily forgot to act as if he didn’t care. _That_ was genuinely cool. He had seen them only briefly during the apocalypse, and he'd had other things on his mind. "Do they get bigger and smaller with the light, like cat's eyes?"

"They're snake eyes, not cat eyes, but yes. It's just that most light is bright light, to me.[3] Hell is mostly dark and a bit drippy. Smells of sulfur and mildew."

Adam wrinkled his nose. He didn’t think much of a Hell that wasn’t wall-to-wall lakes of lava.

Only that was the sort of thought that he had to get rid of, wasn’t it. Caring more about a Hell that was _cool_ than a Hell that was _right,_ and he was grimly certain that Hell probably wasn’t right—maybe for burning up someone like Hitler, but you wouldn’t set aside a whole part of the cosmos just for Hitler, which implied there were a lot of people in there, and the more people who were in there the less likely that all of them deserved it.

Besides, Crowley had come from there and he seemed all right, for a grown-up.

“The point is,” Crowley said, “we’re not humans and we don’t understand what humans need. We need people to tell us. We need _you_ to tell us what’s going on, and how we can help, and _if_ we can help, and probably why and when we can help.”

Adam didn’t want to talk about it.

Adam had been wanting to talk about it for months now.

He poked the ground with the stick again.

Then he said, in a low voice, “I have nightmares.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve tried—” Aziraphale started, and then checked himself. “Sorry. No. Wouldn’t work.”

“What wouldn’t work?”

“Not sleeping.”

“Yeah,” Adam muttered, “I’ve tried, it’s bollocks.”

 _“Ad_ am _Young!”_

“Oh, don’t be a wet blanket, angel, they all know the words by his age.”

“I expect you have something to do with that,” Aziraphale said.

“I had quite a bit to do with television, so, yes, I expect I do. That’s beside the point. The point is . . .”

“The point is,” said Adam, who was tired of the back-and-forth, “that I have nightmares about my friends.” He looked up at the two, who were at least not looking at him with the wariness that Miss Device couldn’t completely shake, and then back down at his stick. “I made them be quiet,” he told the stick. “I took away their _mouths._ They were saying things I didn’t like, and I took away their mouths, and I think I was going to stop them thinking altogether and make them want what I wanted, only I . . . I stopped. But I have nightmares about _that,_ and no nightmares about wanting to destroy the world, and if I care more about three people without mouths than a whole world without life then I think maybe I’m a bad person, and I don’t want to be.”

There was a silence.

“Humans are bad sometimes,” Crowley said. “Comes with the territory. Most of it never comes to anything.”

“If it matters,” Aziraphale said, “I have more nightmares about one person burning at the stake than I do about whole towns dying in the Flood.”

“Is that why you stopped sleeping?” Crowley asked curiously.

“Part of, but I’ve never liked sleeping that much. Not like you. It cuts into reading time. That’s not the point. The point is—the _point_ is, or at least I think the point is, that this whole business was run by individuals who think they have Great Plans and Bigger Pictures and Cosmic Perspectives and all they came up with was a _stupid_ war, which would have cost an entire planet in collateral damage and solved things only insofar as burning everything down counts as ‘solved,’ and with that sort of example in front of us I think perhaps what this planet needs is someone who’s obsessing on the collateral damage rather than the big picture. Er. If that makes any sense. Does that help?”

“I dunno,” said Adam, who thought it did. “Maybe.”

“We may not be able to help you work it out,” Crowley said, “but we can at least promise to be here while you do.”

Aziraphale nodded. “Right.”

“And in the meantime, I can teach you to drive.”

_“Absolutely not!”_

“He’s big enough to see over the steering wheel, he’s big enough to learn—”

 _“Not_ from you! Gluing fifty pence to the sidewalk, that much I’ll let you teach him, but—”

“Because you enjoy watching people try to pick it up,” Crowley said, “just as much as I do.”

“I do n—all right, a little—but—”

“Go back to the bit about driving?" Adam said.

**Author's Note:**

> 1 The answer was, “Just two of them,” but it was the _principle_ of the thing.  [ return to text ]
> 
> 2 The truth was, Adam was generally able to see anything he assumed he could see, which was most things in his line of sight, regardless of how far away they were. He hadn’t yet figured out that this was more than being mildly farsighted.  [ return to text ]
> 
> 3 Crowley was, in fact, entirely unaware that his pupils tended to dilate when he was looking at Aziraphale, and Aziraphale hadn’t told him because he assumed that he knew. Aziraphale was slowly[4] realizing that it wasn't some sort of demonic prey drive and might, perhaps, be related in some way to affection. Possibly.  
>  [ return to text ]
> 
> 4 Because, despite being extremely bright when it came to prophecies, temporal issues, and indeed metaphysics in general, Aziraphale could, on occasion, be a little bit thick.  [ return to text ]


End file.
